Volkswagen to sell 2 million vehicles in China this year

Volkswagen AG, Europe’s largest automaker aims to sell 2 million vehicles this year in China, its CEO Karl-Thomas Neumann said.

The German automaker reported last week that in the first ten months has sold 1.89 million units in China, the largest single market. (1.65; +14.8 percent compared to the same period of 2010).

“I am very confident that we can take the lead in the whole region in 2011,” Karl-Thomas Neumann, chief executive of Volkswagen Group China, said in a statement Sunday.

Volkswagen expects China’s auto market to expand by 8 to10 percent in coming years, with the company expecting to outpace that growth, executives said.

However the Chinese market, which is the fastest growing car market in the Asian market, is expected to grow at quite a slower rate as compared to heavy double-digit growth of 33 percent registered last year.

New vehicle sales in China fell 1.1% last month from a year earlier to 1.52 million units sold according to statistics from CAAM. Weak market sentiment will likely spill over to November, an industry specialist said, but a rebound is expected in December thanks to year-end promotions that will hopeful attract some buyers back to the showrooms.

The German automaker is counting on China to help it surpass General Motors and Toyota as the world’s biggest automaker by 2018.